This invention relates generally to social networking, and in particular to enabling preference portability for users of a social networking system.
In recent years, social networking systems have made it easier for users to share their interests and preferences in real-world concepts, such as their favorite movies, musicians, celebrities, soft drinks, hobbies, sports teams, and activities. Tools have been designed to create nodes on the social networking system that represent web pages that embody these real-world concepts on different domains external to the social networking system. As a result, multiple pages may exist about equivalent real-world concepts.
At the same time, users of social networking systems have shared their interests and engaged with other users of the social networking systems by expressing their interests in these concepts on web pages on different domains external to the social networking system. The amount of information gathered from users is staggering—information describing interests in sports, music, movies, and the like. Social networking systems have recorded this information to personalize the user experience, but social networking systems have lacked tools to enable third-party developers to use this user preference information because of the duplicative pages that have been created on equivalent topics.
Specifically, the information available on social networking systems about users' interests has not been organized to present a singular object for equivalent concepts expressed across different domains. Information about users' interests and preferences is very valuable to third-party developers that seek to drive traffic and increase engagement with their websites. Advertisers may also benefit from this information in marketing interest-based goods and services to users of the social networking system. However, existing systems have not provided efficient mechanisms of organizing and sharing this valuable user preference information.